


Bến Tre

by Albrecht_Starkarm



Category: Black Lagoon
Genre: Character Study, For The Old Guys, Gen, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 05:29:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9804572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm
Summary: Sometimes, things need to be destroyed to be saved, and death always comes before rebirth.There can be no truth without lies.





	

A lissome steel figure kited through the stultifying heat that would have come out beautiful and bronzed in film, denuded of subjectivity, of the battering weight that tore down with satin talons into the brain's wet fragile meat. It numbed thoughts, fastened its horrible strength around grade and shadow and light and color and dimmed them to a long thin seam of bleached nothing like the old overexposed pictures he'd taken years ago while he lived another life, while he was another person, a twelve-year-old with a cheap Brownie playing Walter Cronkite. His dad loved Walter Cronkite, would stare at him cradled in the tiny black-and-white that sat on a battered table in their shitty tenement and would nod at every word. It was the only time he'd ever seen his dad admit to anything worthy coming out of a white man's mouth.

Cronkite was there. He'd already told them and everyone else that everything was lost. He was sure that everyone who could understand the words had already known, and everyone who could not would just piss on the man as a dirty Commie-lover, a pinko, a fuckin' Red who only understood surrender to the great domino that would send the whole goddamn order crumbling down.

Cronkite wasn't with him at _that_ instant, though. The lifers had already shoved the order down through the ranks, every ass-kisser duly conveying the commands down the line that reasoning must be suspended, as always, in this beloved Corps. What Walter Cronkite said live on tee-vee is a total fiction. We are not losing the war in Viet Nam. There has only been a Temporary Setback. It was Marine-perfect.

We're not fighting a losing battle. We're sure as hell not retreating. When it looks like we're retreating, we're advancing on an axis opposite the enemy's front line. Everyone had already guffawed over the bullshit. Anyone who had even a week's TI knew that the war was a farce. The five o'clock follies might have been comedy for the Bao Chi he'd seen sitting through the grand green burlesque, the well-coiffed well-groomed pogues that were Hollywood Marines, John Wayne-perfect with jungle utilities about as well-worn as an Arvin rifle, creased sharp enough to shave with, but they were just distant abstractions for the men who huddled exhausted around the tank's broken husk.

It was a Patton, a beautiful machine wrought from American steel with a Detroit diesel that roared with eight-hundred horsepower, could heft the huge trundling olive-drab dragon through the bush and across rivers and ate up pavement with its treads' hungry rattling cleats. And it was dead now, like the garden of other iron demons that men whose armor-cracking blades with long shafts of gunpowder smoke had slain. The rocket-men had either di-di'd or died, and it didn't matter.

There was no mourning for the superpogues with their ninety-mil guns whose low guttural belch had saved asses and made widows of gook women back home in Hanoi who didn't even know they were waking up alone that morning. No one mourned anyone. Aged manors lined the street, a tony neighborhood that had obviously been built in an age that couldn't imagine that war would not only visit but decide to roost with the Marines that sprawled exhausted in a messy stand of humped-out bodies that had become a mosasic of dirt and grime and gunsmoke and powdered stone and rock and wounds that had scabbed over, flecked with shrapnel that would have the average civvy stateside weeping and begging for a doctor or at least a tetanus booster. It was nothing.

The real peanuts were being carted away, orderlies tending to the minor cases that could still remember their names and could still be troubled by the idea that some yellow bastard had sighted them in and put a bullet through their mean motherfuckin' Marine hides. The less fortunate ones plagued the corpsmen, limbs carved off with a quick snapping spurt of fire, kalash rounds tumbling up through the tissues or sometimes even their own Mattels, bought for a pittance from the Arvin or just snatched off some poor asshole.

Their guts shone like sallow pink plastic when a black wind kicked off the tarps that curtained their still dying bulks with pretensions of dignity. It meant shit. No one sobbed like _The Sands of Iwo Jima_. John Wayne wasn't there to thunder across the screen in anodyne black-and-white like he'd seen in the theater with his dad, the old man silently staring up at a white man's war sandblasted of anything like the blood and mayhem _he'd_ seen in Europe. He might have just been a nigger working engineering for the Green Machine, but all blood was only red. Germans bled and died and Americans and Canadians and Brits and Poles. Only the frogs, professional shitbirds, ever seemed to ooze away from it, his dad had said.

And now they were squatting in the embers of the frogs' war and it could still singe the hairs from your ass. His name had become meaningless. It was there, somewhere, stamped on the tags that'd been pinioned with hundred-mile-an-hour tape, to be unraveled when and if anyone gave enough of a shit to attach it to just another dead black man.

His name was Dutch now, like being reborn after some tribal rite of passage. Just like el-tee Black Bart, the whitest motherfucker Dutch had ever seen, and the other members of Second Platoon. Names vanished. They were civvy shit, less wholesome to cling to than the pogeybait they snapped down, languishing and luxuriating in a greasy mist curdling around them from the shattered engines that had been boiling with angry smoke in vast sheets bleeding through the cityscape's broken jawline. It was a city once. Hue. The most fucking beautiful, ancient, glorious in that jungle hellhole they called Viet Nam that Dutch had seen time and again aboard the iron pegasi they'd mount, peering through the battered old Sikorskys' doors and admiring a landscape patched together with an intricate attention to detail like the works of an anal-retentive model maker: Great forests spreading their arms in swarming canopies too thick for even smoke to permeate; mountain spines rupturing satin savanna populated by creatures huddling in the grasses tall enough to camouflage an elephant and razored to rip into your cheeks. Swamps slumped deep and forbidding. And his people's contribution had been like the white man's to the Great Plains: Nihil.

Black craters bottomed out, miniature lakes that would fill with rain when the monsoon season whipped the swelter into a bitter shivering chill, soil wet and sticky enough to suck your boots from your immersion-footed toes with a misstep. Forests had vanished.

He'd seen the mamasans and papasans, whipped animals in the squalid shantytowns around Khe Sanh and Da Nang thrown up from the grand base-cities' detritus, cradling misshapen twisted apparitions dragged from the decadent Gothic fiction Dutch had devoured as a kid, huddled in the library's musty fug of aged print and yellowing pages. They were real: They were America's gift, after all, and America didn't work in fantasy, even when they were spinning a new world out of nothing but recycled platitudes on the nightly news.

There were two other spades in papa sierra Dutch's squad, and both of them were surly Panthers whose eyes were cold and hard and whose brains had melted down in the heat like everyone else's. There wasn't the hillbilly segregation in Black Bart's platoon like others, and the guy put his trust in Dutch without any real complaint or anything more than the usual bullshit that was a butterbar's gift to any enlisted man. Black Bart might have been a career Marine, but the bastard at least wasn't a lifer, and it ingratiated him to Dutch and the other snuffies.

He was making his rounds with bits of pogeybait. Even a few warm filthy beers snitched from one of the brewed-up tanks that hadn't popped off like the ammo that bloated up in huge throbbing flowers that could toss a ten ton turret away like a demented jack-in-the-box. Marvin Gaye sighed through the stillness that was only quiet for Viet Nam. It was true that Victor Charlie wasn't _there with them_ ; the NVA weren't, either, but they could hear the mortars' distant _blurp_ and their shells' slow patient crack; friendly artillery's regular thunder, scarlet tulips and huge greasy columns blasting up from the muzzles. Incoming one-twenty-two fire was something that happened to other people now, at least, even if the gooks still had their rockets scything down with their horrible indiscriminate warble into the lonely courtyards and streets.

They'd been pulled off the line around the Citadel, but it wasn't relief.

“Chesus _Christ_ , man, you believe this shit? Hey, Dutch, you listenin' to me?” The bitching was pouring out of a five-and-a-half-foot Chicano, Dominguez, who'd been saddled with the name flower child straight in basic by his DI at Pendleton. Dutch had been hammered into what he was _then_ at Parris Island's fetid wet swamps huddled in niggerkill, South Carolina, idle childhood paunch twisted and chiseled and reformed into slab-sided meat, an authentic goddamn killer, heavy raper, a mean motherfucker heart-breaker and life-taker Marine. And he was. It wasn't about bullshit like confirmed kills.

It was time-in, TI, and Dutch had it. He'd already re-upped; adorned his helmet with the usual short-timer's calendar, his second now, but the jungle's ugly gravity was an irresistible warp, sucking him back into its maw again. Dutch had been slavering over his freedom bird, even started obeying his pussy cut-off. And then found his signature scrawling across the extension papers.

There was a reason. He clung to it, that talisman, that _certitude_ that there must have been. It just slipped his imagination. He'd even won those ridiculous fucking stripes, the third that was nothing but a leaden burden on the sinewy biceps that splintered his utilities.

“Yeah, yeah, I'm listenin', Flower. What is it?” Dutch made a point of smoking whenever possible, just to accentuate to _everyone_ that his mouth was otherwise occupied when there was no pussy. And Flower Child still wouldn't shut the fuck up. He'd been bitching for about a half-hour at that point, yowling at White Fang and Smalls, the two bloods he expected to understand his plight as a long-forgotten member of the great unwhite American melting pot.

As far as the bloods were concerned, Flower Child was just another cracker with a funny accent.

“You hear what they doin', man?” Of course Dutch had heard. Everyone had heard. Probably even Victor Charlie had heard, with the full-bore squalling spurting up from the short-round motherfucker. “You hear what they doin'? They sendin' in-”

“I know, I know, the goddamn Black Panthers to put up the flag. The piss-yellow craven flag. I got it. Jesus. You'd think I'm deaf or something, Flower. I've already heard you; they told _me_ first, anyway, to pass around to you people.”

“Who you callin' _you people_?” The squad's resident redneck, Palm Tree, a cornfed two-hundred-fifty-pound motherfucker of a 'sixty gunner that suggested a family tradition of unwholesome intimacy with livestock to Dutch, was guffawing through the bullshit. A committed cross-burning Klan shitbird, he'd naturally be Smalls' inseparable friend. They had the same ugly and obnoxious habits. They both wallowed in gook pussy; sought it, stalked it, hunted it. The younger and the less willing the more delicious.

It was regarded as bad decorum to frag snuffies. Dutch still had an M26, a thick steel lemon bristling with comp B and a taut cable of serrated wire, reserved for both of them, whether Smalls was a brother or not.

“Shut up, Palm. I'm serious. I'm trying to forget I'm in 'nam for six seconds. Can you all just give a brother six fucking seconds?” Dutch cradled the 'sixteen in his lap, leaned his shorn scalp against the tank's flaking charred paint, let his eyes slip closed. It wasn't a nap; naps weren't a sergeant's prerogative.

“Hey, the big boss is pissed. Hey, Dutch, I got a big gift for ya when ya wake up from yer beauty sleep.” Shit, Palm Tree was obnoxious. The guy's name was from the way his ugly hair gathered in heavy spines that settled into fronds falling low over his forehead. He was a jumped-up dull-eyed professional mongoloid.

Dutch cracked an eye, caught a glimpse of the moron's ridiculous loofa of a cock dragged out of his utilities. It was something Dutch had noticed about the inbred trash: Their cocks were fucking huge. All of them.

“Fuck you, Palm Tree, or I'm gonna take my machete here to that little twig of yours.” It was a fantasy he'd had since he'd heard the shitbird putting it to a squalling six-year-old dragged out of some terrified mamasan's arms on their hootch's floor. Dutch had slapped the asshole off of her; it was still meaningless, the stupid fuck twisting up his 'sixty and plastering the walls with grisly clods of brain and blood and glossy black hair kneaded with meat.

“You hear me, Palm Tree? I'm sick of your fucking _shit_.”

“What're ya gonna do, boss-man? Send me'a Vee-Et-Nam?” It was true.

The hell _could_ he do?

“Maybe I'll send you back home to pigfuck, Arkansas, or wherever your brother-dad and sister-mom shit you out on some dirt floor.”

“Nah, that's Georgia, sarge.” Palm Tree's wasn't a studied indifference. It was the truth. He was filth embodied, an unshowered unwashed heap of meat, shaggy and ragged like Sasquatch, something that _should_ have been a primeval horror that the war had liberated, tore from its black jungle manse. He reeked like the gooks; a vast ragged beard was an enthusiastic one-finger salute to the Corps' grooming standard.

No one could hope to give even half-a-fuck about it.

“I've got a frag for you, Palm Tree. You can believe that.” That was their core. A jovial violence, a smile adorning mirthless lips that was the essence of every unit's Sorry Charlie, a head carved off one of the dead when they were sequestered behind the wire and tanglefoot at Khe Sanh, a perfectly still target for Victor Charlie's one-twenty-twos banging off rounds heavier than the gunners.

It was death. Sorry Charlie had not seen but _heard_ life's elemental truths; Death had whispered them in Sorry Charlie's ear and so that hideous rictus smile shone brilliant with its epiphany.

Dutch felt it.

In an instant, Palm Tree's knife was snapping out, and Dutch's machete swept from its long olive-drab sheath with a whisper like paper being dragged through sand, and then they laughed, because what the hell else could they do but laugh, and laugh, and laugh?

When the laughter died, _they_ would die.

“I got one for you, too, suh.” And the little fuck made a point of snapping a crisp firm salute at Dutch, an invitation to any sniper whose eagle-eyed leers were a terror more urgent than any other. You'd never hear the incoming artillery round that plastered you, reduce two-hundred-something pounds of American-made Marine-perfected flesh and fabric and equipment to a sticky scarlet haze on an unauthorized jaunt to visit the only force on heaven and earth that outranked the Corps' Commandant.

A sniper was fear personified. Artillery fire was arbitrary; it was bad luck, something so distant, so _abstract_ , that it was more an act of god than anything else, an errant lightning stroke that plunged from a clear sky to grind you to hamburger.

But a sniper was deliberate, was a questing predator as ferocious as any Marine, and the Marines feared and loathed and respected them. Victor Charlie was a hard motherfucker; Mister Charles was beloved for it, more than any of their feculent feckless lifer pogue asshole officers. The truth was that the Marines didn't _hate_ Victor Charlie. No one who'd ever fought that spectral nightmare in the jungles and the streets, obdurate and fanatical and never retiring from the impossible and insurmountable American juggernaut that thundered through their lives like a steel elephant, could entertain anything but admiration for them.

They killed them, of course, but that was business. They mourned Victor Charlie with the knowledge that they'd never meet a finer man anywhere on the planet. Because Mister Charles was the only force on planet earth that was anything even _close_ to being a Marine, and that placed him above their parents, their preachers, and even Suzy Rottencrotch back at home who was probably merrily banging some greasy hippie while answering their letters with the perfunctory little homilies of love and adoration and duty.

The sniper was the most ferocious of Victor Charlie's implements. They hunted Marines, the planet's hardest and wickedest game, with gimlet eyes and telescopic sights. They pulled triggers, sent a parcel from Moscow or Beijing or some backwoods factory through meat that betrayed the fallibility in every man. They'd sprawl out, rarely just outright _dead_ , because that wasn't how they worked.

Dutch had seen it. The sniper's game. Splatter hands and feet into ugly paste; cram enough lead to open a mine into a man's arms, his shoulders, even his gut, animate his buddies into a febrile frothing-at-the-mouth _need_ to drag him away. And then they'd join him, the only trap that you could bait twice or thrice or with however many stupid loyal motherfuckers had just not gotten the message about what Viet Nam _meant_.

It was a game. It was the most purified game executed on the most defiled and ugliest and most hideous board on the planet. Because while the referees were crooked and the politics were childish and cruel and simply wicked, the _game_ was the only game that mattered to them. Survival was something urgent, an implacable yammering animal craving between everyone's ears, but it had dimmed to something peripheral for Dutch.

He didn't care. Maybe that was it. It wasn't the women, as many as he'd had, a near-virgin with a high school girlfriend and two or three afterwards and then swarming through them in Viet Nam. It wasn't that.

It wasn't the delusions of power that fueled others that had obviously cast off some important screws in the jungle.

It was the candor. It was the simple human _sincerity_ in its savagery, its atrocity. A pink team thundered with whomping blades overhead, kiting low over what had once been a city, bloated insectile beasts pitching down toward the Perfume River's cold gray canvas, chattering with the firepower that lashed out with a child's casual animus at anything that may or may not have been there. It didn't matter.

Dutch chanced a glance up again, caught a glimpse of a Phantom in its wheeling aerobatics, plunging down and gathering in its dimensions and proportions until there was its canopy's sharp glint, shitting out a heap of nape that tumbled with an end-over-end pirouette, capturing the sun's flat inferno on their fat mirrored bodies.

Ravens' feathers blasted up from somewhere.

Men became crispy critters, enameled with gelid gasoline pungent with white phosphorus' garlic.

He'd stared up at the Phantoms on their snake-and-nape run, wondered what it might be while he was playing RTO to summon their wrath upon himself. Speak the magic incantations that would conjure smoke and screaming from the sky on columns of black jet-fire. There would be numbers, figures, the messy and brutal vagaries reduced to facile formulae.

He had read the alchemists, and the philosopher-scientists.

He was another, reciting the spells.

_Expend all remaining._

Snake eyes would snap open their petals, silhouetted against the sky's endless azure canvas, Xs leering down at him. The nape would tumble, exacting in its precision, rattling across him and there wouldn't even be a scream, the oxygen dragged from his lungs in a great gout, but he would be _laughing_.

He'd be laughing because he'd be joining Sorry Charlie, roaring a silent delight through the universe's very fabric, like countless others. He finally understood the Ginsburg poem's meaning. Because he had gone mad, also; not just left behind something precious but _exchanged_ it like he had his tangled thick curls at Parris Island for baldness' lean efficiency. And so something had been transmuted in this place's crucible.

But was that the truth? Weren't there still the raw ingredients _there_ ? It was alchemy's essence. You still began with the right reagents, the right reactants. In their appropriate formula and with the appropriate manipulation, of course, they _became_ your desire.

But you couldn't have anything without those fundamentals.

Dutch let his fingers settle on the Mattel's sleek skin, pitted and scuffed and gouged. He'd already stripped it down, scoured the grime from it, even dragged out the bullets from his mags and wiped them down.

The others were home on their freedom birds when their time ran not just short but out. More than a few of them added their blood to that strange and unwholesome land's soil. But when he'd re-upped again, not even bothering with the _my men need me_ bullshit to his parents, there wasn't only the usual pencil-necked desk-jockey pogue greeting him.

The blackest brother Dutch had ever seen with the whitest speech he'd ever heard, a sharp obsidian sliver of a man in unmarked jungle utilities that roared _Company_. And so he was. The man had jammed out a hand like a bayonet at Dutch. The eyes were cold, a scar ripped in a pallid seam from his left brow to his chin; it wasn't quite the jubilant jab at George Wallace it could have been. His name was never offered, because there was no need for names, the voice as wintry as the cheerless hazel eyes that ripped into Dutch with the wolf's sense of kin in a wayward beast.

The language was not only clipped but something sharpened, an artless graceless rhythmless economy in breath, less an aural Michelangelo and more something stamped on a factory line and honed with machinery's cool blemishless deliberation. The diction was immaculate.

It was an invitation.

Don't re-enlist in the Marine Corps, young man. There's a career for you there, of course. But there's something more rewarding with an outfit that has no need for the bullshit, for the fictions and the mythology.

So Dutch nodded.

_Okay, then._

Blood ran thick over his hands. It stained him blacker than even the obsidian-skinned brother from the CIA. It gathered there, eddied, puddled and coalesced and finally just became surrogate flesh, a chitinous husk, while the skin beneath it rotted and melted and finally just sloughed off. It was a rebirth without the messy shrill religious histrionics.

Vietnamese was already curdling behind the eyes that he'd begun to shackle like the CIA brother behind a pair of sunglasses thick enough to be welder's goggles. They curtained him in a perpetual dusk, a moral and corporeal dreamtime where there was no need to confront anything. Where he became a phoenix, one of the chieh dich phung hoang, one of the arsonists burning down the country around him to save it.

And then the fire burned to ashes. Transmutation, again.

And the man whose dog tags weren't tossed but cradled against his sinewy chest, running effulgent with sweat, curtained in hundred-mile-an-hour tape; the man whose name had become Dutch and then Leonard Jacobsen simply to be carried in his mind even if it would be denied if Victor Charlie or the NVA actually fastened their hands around his neck without just _wringing_ it, which struck him as being something as realistic as Strom Thurmond inviting his parents over for a dress ball; the man who no longer really had a name or even the need for one, had slipped a thick finger into two Russian fragmentation grenades' pins and jerked them from the thickly chiseled black metal bodies and crunched down the firing spoons and serenaded himself with a heavy hot _pop_ while the fuzes seethed and began their irresistible blaze before letting them tumble through his allies' barracks' door.

They splintered with a flat _crunk_ , amplified to about a trillion decibels. There were screams; Hollywood's portrayal of a hand grenade was Hollywood's portrayal of anything, at best a wan shadow of something like the truth. Thick steel shards ricocheted through the cabin; the blasts became protean giants twisting out of their husks when they were awakened at approximately twenty-five-thousand feet every second, caroming from wall to wall in their outrage at being jerked from serene slumber. Meat was stitched and riddled with rusting metal flakes like a constellation of meteorites, hot and cauterizing almost beneficently the wounds.

Guts slopped out.

Arms and legs and hands and feet discovered the intimate truth in the anodyne phrase _traumatic amputation_. And so he continued with grenade after grenade, rolling, pitching, bedlam in its beautiful disorientation caterwauling through the special forces base that ostensibly didn't even dwell in the Laotian highlands.

And then the man named Leonard Jacobsen slipped through the wire and the tanglefoot and drifted unseen and unnoticed, for he was only one man without menace, a wraith like Victor Charlie in the jungle, a fellow traveler in the night, away from that universe, also.

He didn't belong. The act of belonging was something that weighed on him. His only contentment was when his name was Dutch, so it was again.

A drowsy-eyed papasan souvenired the black-skinned giant melting from the foliage passage on a buffalo-drawn oxcart like a glimpse of the middle ages when Dutch brandished his Bao Chi credentials and laid a hype on him about being a stringer from AFP. The bos gurgled, wheezed, immense hooves squelching through the clinging muck rich with soil's loamy essence of generations' tidal certainties, of rain and birth and drought and death and their circular perfection, enriching one another in turn.

The old man spoke pidgin French, pidgin English, a harsh twanging northern Vietnamese; the skin had coarsened to leather and the arms were sinewy with a muscle that probably would've shamed Dutch's own. He looked like he'd been born only a few seconds after the land was birthed into being by the collision of the sky and oceans, urging on the protesting snorting bos with a regular rhythmic _crack_ at their huge asses.

_C'mon, c'mon!_

When the old man shed a loose cotton tunic almost black with perspiration, crusted with generations' old sweat, the flesh was furrowed and ridged and shot with scars in their multitudes.

_From the French. French._

The old man's hide had become the chronicle of a land's suffering.

Dutch couldn't bite back the words.

What about the Americans?

 _Americans? Yes. Yes. This. This is from the Americans._ The papasan's ear had been carved off, a ragged sinuation of a scar sprawling to his right jaw. _The Americans are like the French._

Dutch asked why.

_They come because they know nothing about our land._

The papasan was Cong, of course. But Dutch had finally begun to understand the truth: It wasn't Communism, and it wasn't Capitalism. When the war was finished, and the American war machine rattled off with victory declared for having lain to waste more of _their_ youth than its own, there would probably be another war, and maybe another again. The people were their land, a race of proud yellow humanity sprouting up from the paddies and the soft turbid creeks and the cities that were ancient stone when DC was a tranquil swamp.

The French, and then the Americans, had heaved them into Communism through a misguided war's artificial absolutes, a binary that didn't exist in the papasan's body.

_The Vietnamese can only be killed as men and women, y'see. We can die. Individually. My daughter and my son-in-law, f'r'instance. They died. And my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren, also. And I will probably die, too._

_That's all right. Because the Vietnamese have a determination that threw out the Chinese, and the French, and we will the Americans. Even if they kill every last one of us, the land will just make more, and they'll chase out the Americans in the end._

Dutch remembered being silent.

He, of course, had begun to taste those truths, sucked deep into the lungs with the country's sopping sultry breezes pungent with ancient soil and new rice's vibrant neon-green shoots and there was also a distant poison that was not uniquely American, but the Americans were glorious in their productivity, and daily they seeded this ancient place with more venom than the French could have in an entire war, and the Chinese occupiers for a millennium.

He has crept through the decrepit shantytowns, understanding the easy guile in the Vietnamese with wretched affectations of being a defeated people. They were not. He really didn't see it before; it wasn't even their masterful performances. You don't need much pantomime to fool a blind man, after all.

 _He_ didn't see it because no one saw it. An army of paper ghosts seething with inexpressible bile. Legions of VC beggars and pretty NVA intelligence officers working on their backs and huddled in mess tents' steeping odors and with fingers raw with the war machine's laundry. Dutch understood that the soldiers had never been alone, unnoticed. Even when they persuaded themselves they were comfortable, numbing their regrets and their compunctions with cheap booze in some ugly profiteer's steam-and-cream, they were there, a ready-made uprising that would slit their throats in the night, that would be the grenade hucked through a hootch's door, a satchel charge clapping through the hot night in a command bunker.

And now he saw it.

The ghost army that was exactly as Mao said, and Uncle Ho, and the French: The army are the people, and the people are the army, and it wasn't that the guerrillas were fish swimming in a human river but they were only fine water droplets, drowsy villages whose rice farmers with betel-blackened teeth would simply dredge up AKs and mortars and grenades from thick plastic sacks nestled in the dark mire at sundown and become warriors and then melt back into the ranks sinewy and leathered from their field labors when the sun crested the horizon.

How can you wage war against werewolves when you hunt the wolves but think nothing of the men whose breath reeks of hot blood?

That was it.

He paid the papasan a heap of piasters. Didn't delude himself that it was a courtesy. It was guilt money, blood money. Dutch stalked into a familiar hellhole of a Saigon wharf whose cyclopean proprietor regarded the huge black man with a smuggler's easy equanimity.

_Get me to Thailand, man._

And so it was. He wasn't _equipped_ to return home. Even if he'd be anything but an ugly smear on some rural lane or a New York street or... Or whatever it might be. Even if he'd been forgiven or simply forgotten, lost and unaccounted for in the camp's mayhem, _Dutch_ wasn't fit for it. Not fit for purpose. The gag about NCOs: No chance _outside_. It was the prisoner's cliché.

He'd been inside. But that wasn't quite it. It wasn't to have been pinioned, flightless in some squalid iron cage.

He'd _been_ caged his entire fucking life. The feathers were finally freed to spread out, wings unfurling, and he'd known flight. The alchemy had taken. Dutch, or the man that had become Dutch, anyway, wouldn't just be beaten back into the familiar industrial banality, slump off to college with the GI bill or toil on some Detroit assembly line, pulling down enough for a genial middle-class _whatever_ where he'd drink with his friends in a life that deluded itself it _knew_ any sort of truth, much less the elemental philosophical certainties he'd seen men like his dad just swallow down, bite back, _reject_ because they needed that rejection to survive.

He'd never be his father. He loved the old man; loved his mother, too. But that didn't matter. Because the duct-taped eighteen-year-old name that'd shipped off to 'nam no longer _was_ , and that was the man that loved his parents and still missed them.

Dutch, _he_ was reborn, something twisted apart and shattered and sedulously pieced back together, so it was destined, ultimately, with that colorless patternless jigsaw puzzle without borders, that something would be lost. And that was fine.

It needed to be fine.

He'd been burned to save himself.

“What do you think Dutch dreams about, anyway, when he's sleeping like that?” Dutch wasn't asleep; not quite. He'd been asleep for nineteen years, and figured that was probably enough. Behind his glasses, his eyes inscrutable, he didn't mind feigning it. He was half-slumped in his familiar seat, his throne, the patriarch presiding over his clan of overgrown miscreant brats. They were _his_ brats. His unit. He wouldn't abandon them. None of them was a short-timer, after all, and there were no lifer pogue assholes to bleed them just to accentuate their cause's righteousness.

The new kid, Rock, was nothing like what Dutch had been.

And everything of what he'd been. It was that epiphany. And it was the understanding that there was some knowledge that couldn't be forgotten. Materially, nothing was shackling Rock to this place. The guy wasn't a captive. He was here not because someone had anchored him but because he'd broken his own moorings.

Just like everyone else who washed onto Roanapur's fetid shit-strewn shores. Just like Dutch had, bumming from Pattaya to Phuket to Bangkok and then rushing with violence's sluice to Roanapur. It was so fucking melodramatic it made his sense of decency ache.

But it was true. Roanapur was a spiritual necropolis, a city of dead souls, a sepulcher for the still-breathing who had finally understood the perfect meaninglessness in life, who'd seen and felt all of the lies fueling the grasping acquisitive triteness in the everyday, the industrial. The supreme _childishness_ in all of it.

Kissing your boss' ass and shitting on the people under you.

People here killed and ate and ravaged and tortured like animals animated with humanity's most demonic qualities.

Rock wasn't a guileless babe. He was as corrupted and poisoned as everyone else. As rotten and dysfunctional as everyone else. And it was almost everyone _but_ Rock who harbored delusions otherwise. Dutch could see it, feel it.

Or maybe he just understood the potential, that the uncarved stone had the possibility to make as ugly a sculpture as one that had already been patiently chiseled with a diseased sculptor's masterful touch. Even Revy hadn't been _born_ with that cruelty.

That needed to be earned on the filthy streets, tasting the shit that belied all the fictions humans held about themselves. Even the _word_ humanity that they deluded themselves they deserved.

It was all bullshit.

Only Rock's voice and his deeds were innocent. Dutch knew that something would happen. Eventually. And hoped that it wouldn't place him in an inconvenient and uncomfortable position. Could see it in the Whitman Fever psychosis that gripped Revy, churned her into a half-hysterical froth. The hope staining her eyes.

They were probably already sleeping together. That was fine with him. He liked Asian women, but Revy wasn't Asian: She was just a Chinese-American chick, and that was as distant from Vietnamese as Palm Tree's sister.

He'd disappoint her eventually. Rock would. That was destined. Because she wasn't _quite_ like them; just like Rock wasn't _quite_ like Dutch; just like they weren't _quite_ like Benny. There were always those gradations.

And sometimes they cradled profound things in the margins.

“What do I think Dutch _dreams_ about?” And now Revy's voice, well, that articulated _sneer_ , cracked through the evening's air-conditioned stillness like incoming. It was sharp, flinty, a high pitch that camouflaged its own brittleness by being as hard as fucking diamond. The windows were heaved closed, even Dutch deciding that _this_ was a day for the AC.

“Jesus, what a stupid fuckin' question, Rock. Why doncha go wake him up and ask him. _Hey, boooossss_ ,” and now it was singsong, gooey. “I wonder if you're havin' a nice wet dream about little Rocky-boy-”

“T-that's not what I mean, Revy. It's just...” And Rock didn't quite _whine_. It was an anxious slalom through politesse and tact. It was something planted diametrically opposite Revy. And the kid just didn't _get_ it. He was accustomed to the pogue bullshit in lickspittle flattery and triangulating _exactly_ the right bit of smarm to appeal to the assholes who tyrannized him as surely as any lifer officer was by his COs that could dictate a future of political glory or policing rubbers in some VA hospital in Okinawa.

But that wasn't Revy. She couldn't just be finessed. She could feel it, too. She'd known lifers; never served in the military, but there was no paucity of lifers amongst civilians. Almost everyone was a fucking lifer, grasping and clutching at those pathetic little baubles of esteem amongst their fellow idiots, the country club fucks to the morons who competed for a slot on the bowling team.

“I kind of wonder about Dutch. He's- he's really mysterious-”

“What's there to wonder about with the boss-man? He is what he is. Don't try to look deeper than that, dumbass.”

They were his monstrous children, after all.

“Yeah, I guess so, Revy.”

Roanapur was ugly.

It was a violent and savage and bestial life. But it wasn't a lie.

And, after all, beauty lay in the mind and its understanding. The only real lie was the certainty that there was any truth at all. Unnoticed, Dutch's lips quirked in a slow serene smile.

 


End file.
